


more precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world

by Dialux



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Action & Romance, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Banter, Blood & Guts!!!, Canon-Typical Violence, Established Relationship, Happy Ending, M/M, So It Turns Out They Each Have A Thing For The Other's Eyes, Surgery Is Grosser Than Gun Wounds- Y/N: A Conundrum By Nicolo di Genova, They Also Have A Thing For Violence So
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:08:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25564084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dialux/pseuds/Dialux
Summary: “So. Like old times, then?” Nicky rises to his feet, and helps Joe up as well.Joe smiles at him, grim and cold. “The full distance, darling.”[Joe and Nicky escape the van, blow things up, kiss, and save their family. In that order.]
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 94
Kudos: 1121





	more precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world

**Author's Note:**

> Research notes at the end, as per usual. Hope y'all like it XDD

In one world, a group of hired men remove all their extraneous weaponry as per Copley’s instructions, retaining only semi-automatic guns and heavy body armor, before they storm a small church on the outskirts of Paris to retrieve two- apparently- immortal soldiers.

In another world, a young man forgets about the grenade hidden in a pocket of the armor. 

…

Here’s the thing: these immortal soldiers are really, _really_ observant.

…

Joe snaps three men’s necks before he’s gunned down. Nicky gets a little farther: just far enough to unearth the grenade and throw it into the gunfire he’s getting aimed at him. The subsequent explosion shreds through his torso and thighs, leaving deep gouges in the flesh; Nicky screams through it, world going red and bloody. 

It takes him a minute to stretch a hand out and search for Joe. When he does, it’s cotton that he catches- not flesh. 

“Joe,” he says, through a bleeding, ruined throat. He swallows, and grimaces; it’s blood that he’s swallowing, and Nicky’s fairly certain that it isn’t all his own blood, and that doesn’t become any less disgusting no matter how long he’s had to get used to it. “Joe. Yusuf. _Yusuf-”_

“Nicolo,” comes a choked sound, hoarse as Nicky’s own voice. “Nic- Nico-”

“Shh,” Nicky manages to say, and shifts his grip so he’s clutching Joe’s ankle instead of the cloth.

He closes his eyes. Breathes out. Breathes in, and feels the re-knitting of his flesh and organs. Everyone else in the truck is dead; there’s a fine red mist still hanging in the air, and the awful silence of a battlefield after the battle’s finished. They have time. 

Not much, admittedly, but enough to at least let the worst of their injuries heal.

An interminable amount of time later, Nicky turns to his side and coughs, spitting out blood and what looks uncomfortably like a piece of sliced-up intestine. Joe takes it as a signal to get up himself.

“Can we get out?” he asks.

Nicky glances at the door. It’s triple-reinforced, locked from the outside, and made of twenty-inch steel. They don’t have any weapons on them apart from guns. Both their hands are still caught up in zipties, and it’s really, really fucking inconvenient.

“Give me five minutes,” he sighs, and starts dislocating his thumbs.

…

They roll out of the truck exactly three hundred and fifty-three seconds later, buckled into decently-fitting body armor and carrying even better-quality guns. Whoever’s after them, they haven’t skimped on the weaponry.

Nicky drags Joe through the empty cornfields, taking care to avoid the obvious paths. They need to disappear; they need to disappear properly, and to a place where they can’t be seen, and quickly, because their escape from the truck hadn’t been quiet or subtle in the least.

“Stop,” says Joe, when dawn seems to be creeping on the sky and they still haven’t gotten anywhere meaningful. Nicky ignores him, and Joe catches his wrist, squeezes hard enough to bruise. “Nicolo. We need to stop.”

“We need to get away,” he replies. 

“Yeah, but not without thinking about it. Act, not react.”

Nicky pauses, and slumps over, unable to really maintain his balance; uncaring of the mud currently being smeared over the extensive holes in his clothes. That grenade had ripped through a hell of a lot, and the body armor only covers so much.

“Fine.”

“They found us in France,” says Joe quietly. “All the way from Sudan.”

“Maybe they tracked Andy.”

“...right.”

Nicky sighs, shaking his head. “Of course not. Don’t- don’t be ridiculous.” The very idea that someone can _track_ Andy is-

“You said it.”

“And you agreed.”

Joe lifts an eyebrow, barely visible under the dove-grey sky. Nicky exhales slowly.

“We need to leave,” says Joe. He goes to push a hand through his hair, then stops, grimacing at the state of it: his skin’s not really its normal shade any longer, but rather painted in a flaky crust of blood and viscera. “If they can track us through whatever Booker’s done- we’ll need to be more careful.”

“If they got Andy and Nile and Booker,” says Nicky.

“Mm.” Joe swallows. “Yeah. That won’t be good.”

“So. Like old times, then?” Nicky rises to his feet, and helps Joe up as well.

Joe smiles at him, grim and cold. “The full distance, darling.”

They take off, angling north to north-east, heads down and guns cocked.

…

They tend to rely on Booker nowadays to get the safehouses ready, to vet their potential employers, to determine their extraction plans. But Joe and Nicky still have a number of safehouses that nobody knows about, separate even from Andy: places where they’ve hidden out, places of sentimental value, places of strategic value. Hell, Nicky’s got certain ramshackle caves in the depths of Thailand that he’s pretty sure Joe doesn’t know about, and Joe’s spent almost every minute of the past thousand years at his side.

 _After we stopped trying to kill each other,_ thinks Nicky dryly, and is so punch-drunk on exhaustion that he nearly giggles aloud. It’s only the stitch in his side and the persistent thump-thump of the gun against his chest, punching out the air, that keeps him silent.

So this place isn’t much; just a tiny cabin off of a lake, tucked into leafy willows so well that it isn’t visible unless someone’s practically on top of it. The last time Nicky used it had been nearly a hundred years previous, trying to hide from a rampaging platoon of American soldiers in the first world war. 

He hasn’t visited it since, and it shows: Joe grimaces at the algae sliming the floor and the state of the clothes stashed in the corner- all crumbly, the way cloth gets after a hundred years of exposure- but he’s white-faced under the beard, and he doesn’t look like someone who’s got the energy to complain very much. 

“I’m going for a swim,” says Nicky. “Need to clean off. You up for it?”

Joe’s nose wrinkles. “We need food.”

“I think there was a small town ‘bout a half-mile due west.” Nicky hesitates. “I don’t want to split up.”

“No,” says Joe, and the way he scrapes his eyes over Nicky says all the words he won’t right now: of protectiveness and warmth and the old, unbending fear of watching those you love die. Of course, Nicky’s died just as much as Joe today; he isn’t surprised that neither of them want to let the other out of his sight. “A wash and then we get bread. You have some money?”

“I’m perfectly willing to pickpocket,” says Nicky dryly, and starts stripping out of the rags hanging onto his body by thread and a prayer. He nods towards the corner where the clothes had been. “There should be some coins there, but they’ll be a century old, and you’ve got an allergy to rust.”

Joe snorts- it’s an old joke, the idea that they have allergies any longer- and pushes Nicky out of the door. They stay in the shallows of the lake- it’s a brisk morning, and they’re definitely not in the mood for anything that involves deep water, not after Nile’s nightmares- and wash off the blood and dirt by cupping water in their hands and sluicing it over their heads. The walk to the town’s not fun; Nicky stays awake only by pinching his wrist hard enough to bruise, and the sole reason why he doesn’t actually have a dislocated wrist is because he does it too slowly and the healing kicks in too fast.

There’s a bakery in town, which Nicky’s grateful for- he doesn’t know the name of the town, but it’s definitely small enough that any country apart from France wouldn’t have one- and it’s open, too, at the crack of dawn, with fresh-baked croissants and pain au chocolat and, best of all, black coffee.

He and Joe get three cups each, and five pastries, and, with the last of the money in a wallet that Joe pinches from someone’s pocket, a hemp-woven bag to put all the food in. Then they return to the cabin and eat half the food, shove the rest of it aside, and sleep.

…

Nicky wakes at dusk, when the light creeps under the slats of the door and into his eyes. Dying and coming back tends to fuck up even the stoutest of internal clocks, and it isn’t like there’s been any shortage of dying over the last week. He winces and drags himself up, nudging Joe awake while he’s at it.

“I hate black coffee,” mutters Joe.

“Well, I hate cold coffee,” retorts Nicky, and throws one cup back, face twisting with distaste. “Guess we’ll have to tough it out, big guy.”

“Yeah.” Joe stretches out his legs. He closes his eyes, biting into the last croissant. Then he opens them. “We’ll have to go back, won’t we?”

“If they’ve got Andy and Booker…” 

“We don’t have a choice.”

“Yeah.”

“This is why I told you to take that course in ethical hacking,” says Joe. “Like, a whole five years ago. Now we’re stuck without any other clues in-”

“Oh, we’re starting with that, are we?” Nicky chokes back another swallow, and lets the sweet bitterness- Joe’d poured the same amount of sugar into one cup as entire cities had access to about seven hundred years ago- coat his tongue. “Why don’t we skip the blaming until we’re safe. And all together. _Please.”_

“I’m just saying-”

 _“Yusuf,”_ says Nicky, and Joe sighs, skull rolling back to the wooden door. 

“Yes. Fine. We go back to Goussainville, try to find something. Then what?”

“Then,” says Nicky, rolling his eyes, “we kill Copley and his men, figure out where Andy and Booker are, and get the hell out of there.”

…

Their trip back to Goussainville isn’t easy. Joe had figured out how to hotwire cars through sheer necessity- trial and error, really- back in the 1960s, but it takes them time to find a car in this goddamn car-forsaken countryside that won’t be immediately missed and traced back to them, and it takes them even longer to identify the actual direction of Goussainville with respect to where they are.

By the time they reach, the fires that had been set have turned into ashes, and the bodies have started to stink.

“Andy’s work,” says Joe, nudging a handless man with the toe of his boot. There’s so many bodies ranging the church’s pews: the majority are either shot or stabbed, but there’s also a good few near the altar whose heads have plainly been dislocated. “Either that, or Nile’s more like Andy than Andy’s like Andy.”

Nicky snorts, pointing the sword that’s been discarded a little ways away, coated with blood. “It’s Andy. It’s definitely Andy.”

The sword’s a jian, and it’s one of very few weapons they have that’s not been specially remade to their specifications- just unused enough not to require reuse, just of use enough not to be discarded. As far as Nicky can tell, the only person alive who’s been trained in its proper use is Andy.

“You take the inside, I’ll take the out?”

Nicky nods, and they split up for the first time since getting kidnapped. He usually takes the inside- Nicky tends to breathe quieter, and also not get distracted by the bodies left behind- while Joe gravitates towards the perimeter, because he’s quicker on the draw. But Andy and Booker are always around; the normalcy of their actions accompanied by the sheer abnormalcy of the lack of the people with them: it feels really, really fucking obscene.

In, and in, and in: the light’s gone out and there’s a number of shattered jars all over the floor, dried herbs sending a pungent smell over the hall. Some of the furniture has been overturned, and the cushy ottoman that Joe liked to use as a backrest has been slashed open by some overzealous idiot. At least their weapons haven’t been stolen: Nicky’s longsword and Joe’s scimitar are still in their scabbards, rolled into the corner between their bed and the wall. 

It’s pretty clear to him that they’ve escaped- Booker’s bag is missing, and so is Andy’s backpack, and Nicky doesn’t recall seeing the grey sedan that they’d used to come from Charles de Gaulle. There’s very little left in the room; some scattered clothes, some abandoned knives. 

And a phone.

It’s Booker’s phone; Nicky recognizes it- there’s bloodspatter on the screen, which takes some time to clean off- and he manages to unlock it after two tries.

“What the fuck, Libretto,” he mutters under his breath, swiping through different screens as quickly as he can. 

Libretto: Nicky’s nickname for Booker. It’d been his own puns that inspired Booker’s current name after his older alias got burned sometime in the Congo. 

But now, as he sees the number of texts between Booker and Copley- who else can it _be_ other than Copley, talking about those imaginary girls from Sudan- he feels a strange, swooping sensation in his stomach. The texts don’t begin a week before that Sudanese mission: they begin _months_ earlier. And they keep referencing spoken conversations, which implies a far deeper relationship between the two than Booker’s let on.

There isn’t much that Nicky can’t make sense of; it’s all very plain language, no codewords. 

Which is why the word _Merrick_ takes him by surprise.

No other names are mentioned. No other names are discussed. 

_What were you up to?_

Nicky switches on the data and runs a quick search, eliminating the top results- he doesn’t think it’s an architecture company, nor a dog-sitting one- and pauses at the pharmaceutical one. The CEO and CFO on the website don’t look too bad, but then Nicky sees the owner and founder: Steven Merrick.

The guy’s quite clearly insane.

Some of the speeches he’s given are the kind which can only sound reasonable to rich buggers with more money than sense. Most of the speeches he’s given are clearly geared towards making as much of a profit as not. And he’s the head of Merrick Industries: the face, the reputation, the bright-eyed, smooth-tongued man spearheading his company into immortality.

It’s that phrase which makes the switches burn together in his brain.

_He wouldn’t._

Joe returns then, frowning; there’s nobody patrolling the compound. No further clues. He thinks Andy and Booker have gone east, but he isn’t sure.

“One good thing out of this mess,” he mutters, hefting the scimitar.

Nicky swallows, and hands him the phone. “Read it.”

Joe takes it, but his frown deepens when he sees the look on Nicky’s face. “Why?”

“Because I need to know if you’re seeing the same thing that I am.” 

“Seeing the same thing,” repeats Joe flatly. “Isn’t this Booker’s phone? Nicolo-”

“Yeah,” says Nicky. Holds Joe’s eyes, so he knows how fucking important this is. “It is.”

“He’s going to be pissed when he realizes you’ve been snooping.”

_Not half as pissed as I’m going to be if I’m correct._

Nicky folds Joe’s fingers over the phone, and stalks away without answering: he doesn’t really trust himself to answer, not right now. They have to focus on the mission ahead of them. They have to get Andy and Nile out. They have to figure out what the _fuck_ Booker was thinking, and probably rescue that idiot, too, and then Nicky can actually address it.

Until then…

“Let’s pray that I’m wrong,” he mutters aloud, and starts patching the church up again, at least enough that it doesn’t look like a slaughterhouse from the outside. 

There won’t be any saving the actual bones of the place, and he sure as hell isn’t going to drag any of the bodies out. But the abandoned cars still have canisters of petrol that Nicky takes the time to remove and then pour out over the most strategic spots, and then spends the last remaining hours of sunlight removing everything of value from inside of the church. There isn’t much that he’d be sad to lose; immortality has a way of teaching people to be frugal. But there’s a few things: a necklace, a sword; a couple of greaves engraved beautifully in the classical Abbasid style; a weave of cotton so old it’s gone translucent. 

Just as he’s lugging the last of Andy’s axes outside, he hears a series of violent curses, and drops them, heedless of the scratch and dent on the floors. Joe comes storming out, face flushed.

“He _wouldn’t,”_ he says.

“I really, really hope there’s something else going on,” replies Nicky. He reaches out and grips Joe’s forearm, rings his wrist with his fingers and reels him into an embrace. “But. You see it, too?”

“Aiming for immortality,” spits Joe, and Nicky drops his head to his shoulder. So they’ve walked the same path, then. It’s not just Nicky’s overactive imagination. “It’s pretty fucking clear.”

“We’ve got to save Andy. And Nile.”

“I know. And after that, we need to get to Merrick. If Copley’s told him-”

“-it’s going to be a bloodbath.”

“Or _worse.”_

“Yusuf,” whispers Nicky, tightening his grip. _“Yusuf._ They- they took us. If they’d kept us, if they’d- if we hadn’t-”

“Shh,” says Joe. “No. We’re not thinking about that now. Nicky- Nicolo. Nicolo. We didn’t stay: that idiot had a grenade. We escaped. And we’re going to do this. We’ve been in worse situations. Do you remember- do you remember that time in Mysore? In- fuck- was it two years before the turn of the century?”

“The time we spent with Tipu Sultan?”

“Yeah.”

“Then- one year, I think. Not two.”

“I didn’t think we’d manage to escape,” says Joe, and nudges the corner of Joe’s mouth with a thumb, smudgy and warm and unbearably kind. “But we did, didn’t we? We always have.”

“It helps that we can’t die,” says Nicky, canting into the touch. He lets himself clutch onto the memory of that mission: the blood, the terror, the howl and scream of rockets the likes of which he’d never heard before. And threaded through the cold fear like a silver ribbon through dark hair is the sweetness of Joe, of Yusuf: of their love, of their warmth, of their trust in each other, even through the most awful of times. Then he pushes away, nodding to the materials stacked on the back of the pickup truck which they can take to another safehouse. “You want to set the fire or pack up?”

“I’m driving again,” says Joe, mock-heavily. “I deserve to burn _something,_ Nicky.”

“I offered to learn,” Nicky returns, and kneels to pick up the axes. When he looks up, there’s the faintest suggestion of a smile on Joe’s face. Nobody else in the entire world would be able to tell; but Nicky can see it, the quietest layer of humor, running underneath all the terror and anger and hurt, clear as sunlight through clouds. “You were the one who said it wasn’t necessary, _Yusuf.”_

“Ah, I see,” he says, pressing the back of his hand to his mouth. “I tell you to learn computers, and you refuse, and blame me for it. I tell you not to learn driving, and you accept, and still blame me for it.”

“Such is a companionship born in war,” says Nicky mournfully. He hides his face amidst the axes; he doesn’t think he can bite back the smile. “Constantly finding reasons to hate you.”

“Tell me,” says Joe, leaning back against the wall and grinning- Nicky can all but _hear_ it. “Is it easy?”

“Yes,” says Nicky, and finally tilts his head up to Joe, lets him see the love that Nicky wouldn’t ever be able to hide, not even if they’re to last for another hundred centuries. “But I keep finding more reasons to like you as well, so I think it breaks in favor of love.” He pauses, then adds, completely unconvincingly: “Regrettably.”

Joe laughs aloud, finally, and kisses him, ignoring all the sharp blades between them, hands warm- so warm- and eyes ever, ever warmer.

…

They drive due north after that, straight to Calais, with a detour near Amiens to drop their stuff off and get a set of passports and documents that name them British citizens instead of French. They really can’t afford to be delayed because they’ve been stupid enough to forget basic things like paperwork or the suspicious number of axes in the back of their truck.

Nicky dozes through the drive in France, then starts hunting down as much information as he can once they cross into Dover. It shouldn’t be that difficult to figure out where Andy and Booker would go; they don’t tend to have many safehouses here, for the simple reason that they haven’t spent a lot of time here since Booker joined- French prejudice and all that. Nicky suspects it’ll take him another hundred years to decide he’s a citizen of the world instead of any place, but the poor bastard had grown up during the French Revolution and has some… decidedly patriotic views in his skull.

“There’s the house down by the sea,” he says aloud. “And I think Andy had another apartment in that neighborhood- what’s it called now?- in London that she likes.”

“Soho,” hums Joe.

“Mmm. I don’t think she’ll aim for the moors.”

“Is that supposed to be a pun?”

“Haha,” says Nicky halfheartedly. “If they think we’re still with Copley, they’ll aim for him."

"Unless Booker wants to take them directly to Merrick?”

“I think Andy would figure that out damn quick,” says Nicky dryly. 

Joe taps his fingers against the steering wheel, frowning. “She trusts us.”

“And she’s smart. Have some faith.”

“Don’t start,” says Joe, shafting a glare towards him.

Nicky rolls his eyes. “Stop worrying.”

“Can we figure out where Copley is?” Joe’s voice goes flatter when he’s irritated, and he gets irritated when he’s trying to hide the fact that he’s scared out of his fucking mind. Nicky reminds himself of that fact. “Or are your hacking skills not up to speed?”

 _Really_ reminds himself of that fact.

“When we’re done with this,” Nicky tells him pleasantly, “I will sign both of us for as many hacking and software courses as will accept us.”

“Nico- Nicolo-”

“-until then, we’re going to assume that I’m doing the best I can-”

“-I didn’t mean-”

“-and go to Soho, because there’s no way that I’ll track a CIA agent down who doesn’t want to be found.”

For a long moment, Joe doesn’t say anything. Then he sighs, and jerks his head in a nod. Nicky settles back into the seat, though he extends a hand to the gear-changing stick- whatever it’s called- and lays it there, open-palmed. After a breath, Joe’s hand comes down and crushes it, tight enough to bruise or sprain in any other person.

“One step at a time,” he murmurs, low and soft and rumbling.

“The full distance,” says Nicky, and, impossibly, tightens his grip on Joe’s hand.

…

The flat in Soho is empty, though it’s the empty of something cleaned out rather than something unoccupied. There’s empty, dustless spots where the packets of jerky and canisters of wine and water would have been, and they look fresh enough that Nicky’s confident in his assessment of missing the others by only a few hours.

“That means we’ve got all three of them here,” says Joe. He nods to the three toothbrushes currently lined up damply on the sink, and sinks onto the moldy cushion that might- once upon a time, with about double the stuffing the poor thing has right now- have been one of those low monstrosities that Quynh had favored for eating dinner and also caused a persistent ache in Nicky’s own lower spine. “So. What next?”

“I’ll figure out where Merrick’s located. You’ll get us the guns?”

Joe grimaces but nods, flexing his calves in a frankly indecent manner. Nicky rolls his eyes, and starts figuring out a secondary base for them to attack: Merrick’s headquarters are going to be well-guarded, but he won’t be worried about Joe and Nicky attacking a secondary location. 

Well, he probably won’t be expecting an attack at _all,_ which can only work to their advantage.

“Anything?” asks Joe, shouldering his way into the room.

Nicky glances up at him. “There’s a place about a half-hour from here. You got it?”

Joe’s teeth flash. “Oh, yeah. Just where we’d left them.”

“Pack up, then,” says Nicky. “And let’s _go.”_

…

They walk into the lab at midnight, and aim for even more swiftness than usual. Joe tends to favor announcements of surrender and loud explosives, but Nicky’s talked him into something more subtle. 

Nothing frightens men like Copley- and Merrick- more than the unseen death.

And Nicky’s certainly not above frightening them into making mistakes.

There aren’t many guards, and those that remain aren’t very good at their jobs. Nicky sets up a sniping position in a nearby tree and gets the ones at the gate without any difficulty. Then he breaks into the gate, opens it, and lets Joe roll their car into the front entrance, right before the steps begin. 

The security guard that comes out to question them gets a neat shot to the head, just out of sight of the camera sweeping the other end of the courtyard. Then Joe sweeps inside, and Nicky takes the rear for clean-up. 

It’s usually the other way around, but Joe’s got a better hair-trigger instinct and a quicker fire. Without Andy or Booker flanking them, they need to maximize the skills that they have: which means Nicky’s watching Joe walk into danger instead of the other way around. It gives him a new appreciation for Joe’s mental fortitude.

At least until they get into the thick of things. 

Joe in the middle of battle is a glorious thing: gold and fury and lightning made flesh, fierce and fell and ruthless. Joe in the middle of _any_ battle is glorious, but Joe right now is even better; he’s moving swiftly, as economically as he can, because they don’t have time. Shooting with his gun in one hand, slashing with his scimitar in the other. Just enough to keep the people down long enough for Nicky to shoot them dead. The people he’s chopping down barely have the time to get their shots away before he’s carved through them, and before they can howl over the loss of a limb or choke on their sliced-up lungs, Nicky’s ensuring they just… don’t.

By the time they end up in the research labs, their faces are sprayed red. Their hands are worse, but thankfully, blood dries quickly.

“This one’s unlocked!”

“Keep watch?” asks Nicky, already breaking into a jog towards the monitor that Joe had indicated. 

Joe nods, grimly, and Nicky starts digging through the files. There isn’t much of anything on the actual server; just analyses of some stuff to cure diseases that Nicky’s never heard of before. There’s molecular models, and some other drug pipelines that they’re trying to iron out; the email account is equally as useless. Then Nicky connects to the cloud server joining all of the research, and feels his blood go cold at the most recently uploaded file, no more than nine minutes old: _IMM_2019_SUBJECT1_LIVER1._

 _To be fair,_ he tells himself, trying to keep his hands from punching the console into powdered glass, _IMM could stand for anything._

Immunology. Immunity. Immediate. 

But it could also stand for immortality, and Nicky’s hands are shaking because of that when he clicks on it to see the patient metadata.

There isn’t much there, unlike for a lot of the other patient information. Just a description that could match Booker, and a blank spot for the age, and a picture of a liver, pinkish and still bloody. 

_Wait a minute._

He returns to some of the other patient data, and the livers there aren’t- fucking _raw,_ are they? They’re washed out, all grey and brown. But this one is decidedly _not_ that. 

Then, even as he’s watching, a second picture goes up, titled: _IMM_2019_SUBJECT1_LIVER2._

 _We only have one liver, right?_ Nicky can’t remember. 

Is it one liver and two kidneys? 

Or vice versa?

“Joe,” he calls. “One liver, yes? And two kidneys?”

Joe’s eyes go all disappointed and disbelieving, like he can’t believe Nicky’s actually asking him this question. The fucker keeps acting like he’s so much better than Nicky, simply because his people had once had better medical skills. 

“Nicolo,” he replies, “you ought to know that it’s four livers.”

“Do _not_ stand there and lie-”

“-I’m not lying!”

_“Yusuf.”_

“I’m not,” he says. Then he smiles, pearly teeth shining on his bloodspattered face, and Nicky heaves a sigh. “If we’re talking about cows, I’m perfectly accurate.”

“And humans?” asks Nicky flatly.

“One liver. Which you should _know-”_

“Believe me,” says Nicky, deleting all the files with vindication and stalking over to Joe, “I’ll add anatomy classes to the list of things I need when we’re done with this. Right now, they’ve taken two livers from someone who’s six foot one. Whole livers.”

“Isn’t that Booker’s height?”

“I think the livers are, too,” says Nicky.

Joe snorts, but follows him outside without further comment, where they split up: Nicky sidles into the car they’d driven from Goussainville, starts setting things up. He loses some skin when he gets the meat of his palm stuck between the final locking material, but it happens quick enough, which is what matters. Then he sets up the timer and strides out of the gate.

Joe arrives almost immediately, in one of Merrick’s shiny cars, all fitted-out and chromatic and low-slung chassis. 

“Nicolo,” he says, as Nicky opens the passenger door. “Please don’t tell me that I should have set the bomb myself-”

“-patience, love,” says Nicky, flashing his teeth.

Right on cue, fire blooms over his shoulder, visible to Nicky only through the shine of Joe’s eyes, suddenly gone scarlet and gold. For a moment he admires it: how beautiful Joe can be, when he’s not trying, when he’s admiring something older and crueler and more terrible than Nicky can ever be. Then Nicky thinks, _screw admiring, really,_ because he’s spent long enough _not_ kissing the man in front of him, and pushes forwards to properly, fully bite at Joe’s bottom lip.

…

The laboratory goes up in flames, and they drive into the dawn with red hands, red faces, red, red, red lips.

…

They scrub off quickly, just enough to get the blood off the itchiest places: the join of the thumb and the hand, the grooves of the neck, the space between the eyebrow and the eye. Then they drive to London proper, and pack their guns into neat dufflebags, and use their inability to permanently break their legs to finagle into the backdoor from the nearest building over. 

“Fifteenth floor’s the one where the experimental research happens.”

Joe nods, and takes the card from the man they’d throttled into unconsciousness just before he walked into the office, and unlocks the elevator. “You ready, Nicolo?”

“Yes,” says Nicky, cocking the gun. “Always. Full distance, remember?”

Joe grins, brief and gone, like sunlight shafting through clouds: inevitable, unstoppable. Always, even when the clouds seem like all that there is, there is a shining star hanging beyond it. Nicky remembers the times that they’ve had together, all the missions, all the pains, all the deaths. Off of cliffs, into dungeons, through damp, smog-ridden forests. They’ve slaughtered armies and silenced kings, the two of them, the four of them; they’ve walked into fire and out of flame, unhurt, uncharred, undead, furious. 

And Joe has been there beside Nicky for these nine-hundred years. He’ll be there until the end. Whatever distance they must travel, whatever paths they must tread, they’ll be there together: the full, terrible, yawing distance until they’re swallowed by death at last.

“Yes,” repeats Joe, stepping closer to Nicky and kissing him swiftly, a hard press of lips to lips. “Be careful. Get them out. Stay safe.”

Nicky can only answer one of those truthfully, so he doesn’t; just grins back at Joe, because they’ve done this too many times to really be nervous any longer. There’s anticipation in his bones making him jittery, and there’s fierce anger, and there’s also the faintest flickers of fear. 

But no _nervousness._

“I love you,” he says, instead of all those other words thick in his throat.

He thinks Joe understands anyhow: his face softens, impossibly, like a piece of chocolate gone smooth and melty under the sun, and his hand skims up to cup Nicky’s jaw, then back, thumb warm against the dip behind Nicky’s ear, his palm large and flat on the side of his neck. Nicky lets himself enjoy the warmth for a moment, no longer, then backs away, into the lift, and watches the silver doors close on Joe’s beautiful, beautiful face.

…

When he breaks into the lab, Andy’s got her eyes closed, head tipped back against her bed. She would look asleep if not for the white clench of her fingers: the tension is, obviously, not for herself, but rather Booker, right next to her, his spine arched and his throat issuing a scream which Nicky will never forget.

Nicky shoots the woman leaning over him remorselessly. 

Andy opens her eyes at the rapport of the gun, shock and surprise painted over it like a sunrise. “Nicky,” she whispers.

“Hey, boss.” Nicky skirts the outside of the lab, just in case there’s anyone hiding in the corners- he’s not going to get captured before he rescues the others- before he approaches Andy and starts to undo the bindings around her arms. “You don’t look so hot.”

“I don’t feel so hot.” She pauses, then says, briskly, “I lost my immortality.”

“Oh, fuck.”

“Book shot me.”

“Oh _fuck.”_

“He and Copley are working together.”

“I’m going to… need a minute. Before you hit me with another bomb.”

Andy lifts an eyebrow, and Nicky turns, nearly shooting the person who bursts into the room; he just manages to jerk his shot to the side when he recognizes Nile.

“You escaped,” she says, and sags, relieved. “What about- Joe?”

“He’s downstairs,” says Nicky, brows knitting together. “Did you escape, too?”

“She took off,” says Andy flatly. Her eyes are a dull color now, all storm and thunder instead of molten silver. “Before we went to Copley.”

Nile steps forwards, chin jutting up. “I came back.” 

They keep talking; Nicky turns his focus onto Booker, who’s face is a waxy shade of yellow that would make Nicky nauseous if he didn’t have nearly a millennia of experience with dead bodies. His chest is sliced through with neat lines that look more indecent for the fastidiousness: Nicky’s used to the raw mess of viscera and guts that comes from guns or swords or axes, not deliberate, surgically precise wounds that take far, far too much time to heal.

He undoes the binding around Booker’s wrists, then his calves; tries not to feel faint when Booker remains limp as a dead fish.

 _Bad comparison._ Nicky’s hands clench, tight, on the butt of his gun. _Really,_ really _bad comparison._

Joe would be a better person for this: he’s kinder, funnier; he can speak to Booker in the French of his childhood. And he’s wonderful at keeping his attention on what’s important instead of panicking like Nicky wants to do right now. 

“How many times did he die?” he murmurs.

Andy’s hand presses down on his shoulder, hard and comforting. “A lot. After I woke up- fourteen. Easily. That I could tell.”

And Booker tends to die quiet; Joe always exhales loudly when he dies, like someone’s punched the air out of him, and Andy full-body twitches as if she’s been struck by lightning. But Booker dies quiet, and if he’s done it fourteen times that _Andy_ knows, it’s definitely more than that.

“They extracted a liver from him,” says Nicky quietly. “Twice.”

“Fuck,” says Andy, hand spasming bruise-tight on Nicky’s skin.

Nicky closes his eyes, then opens them, lets his brain go cold and harsh and empty. They can’t afford for him to be compromised, not now, not when they’re so close to escape. Even as he calms himself, Booker inhales raggedly, breath whistling through his lungs; Nicky sags, a little, with relief. He’d forgotten: Booker dies quiet, but always comes back to life loud as a squall. Andy thinks it’s because he hasn’t lived through the witch trials and Joe thinks it’s because rebirth’s the only time that Booker ever forgets himself enough to be anything other than sardonic or bitter. 

Nicky doesn’t actually think there’s any reason for it: he’s stopped looking for higher reasons regarding everyday events a few months after Quynh died.

As he watches, the hole in Booker’s side slowly closes over. There’s still no color in his face, but he’s breathing, and he’s tensed; subtly- Nicolo remembers this kind of pain, where it’s so bad that he can’t actually move enough to protect himself but all his instincts are telling him to curl up- but as he watches, Booker’s legs flex, and he makes a noise, deep and wounded, from lungs that had probably been punctured just a few moments earlier.

“Right,” says Andy briskly. “You have any more weapons on you?”

Nicky glances away from Booker briefly. “Saw an axe in the secondary lab. You up for it, boss?”

“Don’t make me angry,” she admonishes, but there’s the faintest of smiles on her face. 

“Never,” he says, before he turns back to Booker, who’s finally got his eyes slitted open. “Hey, Booker. You up to get out of here yet?”

Booker’s mouth opens the slightest open, and his jaw clicks once, twice, thrice. Joe would’ve already filled the silence with a number of words of his own- angry words, bitter and sour and impatient words- but Nicky holds his tongue and keeps watch of the door, giving Booker as much privacy as he can in these close quarters. 

Finally, Booker manages to croak out, “You should leave me here.”

“Probably,” agrees Nicky, equably. Booker makes a sound not unlike a whine, or a sob, or a moan; he chalks it up, charitably, to the pain Booker’s likely still in, and not Nicky’s response. “But this has never been about should, Book. You’re one of us, and we’re going to get out before we decide what needs to be done. So. Can you move yet?”

“Give me five minutes.”

“You’ve got two,” Nicky tells him.

There’s a reason that he’s come to the lab and not Joe: Nicky can focus past the immediate sting of betrayal far better than his partner. But just because Nicky’s calmer about it doesn’t mean he’s absent of vindictive bones in his body. The things that Booker’s surrendered himself to means that Nicky’s not as angry as he might have been- if he’d not been able to escape that van, for instance- but he’s still _angry._

When they leave, the bodies that Nicky had cut through to get to the lab are doubly as high: Nile’s work, he presumes, and good work at that; very efficient. Nicky’s quite impressed with how quickly she’s adjusting to this business.

They stop at the stairs to regroup- and Nicky takes the moment to call Joe on one of the radios that Merrick’s guards held: the channel’s number is 1099, as usual whenever one of them get the chance to pick the number.

“You in?”

“Yes,” replies Joe, voice tinny but warm, and Nicky sags briefly against the wall. “They haven’t got any security here- they were worried about us getting the others out.”

“None at all?” asks Nile sharply.

Joe snorts. “Oh, they had a few. Could’ve been none of them, really, for all the good they did; I didn’t even die once.” He pauses, then adds, voice amused, “Good job, though, Nile, in getting in. We were expecting to have to rescue you, not have more back-up.”

“Speaking of…”

“There’s a couple hallways down which you can get down. We can be out before they know it.”

“No,” says Andy. She’s white-faced and very rigid against the wall, but her grip on the axe is firm and she’s snatched a gun off of someone else, a wicked-looking one that looks more suited to releasing as many bullets as possible than any precision-activity. “We’re finishing this. Where’s Merrick?”

“Boss,” says Nicky, echoed a beat later by Joe from the radio. He swallows and forges on when Andy turns those terrifying eyes on him. “We can get _out.”_

“And spend the rest of our time chasing after him? Or away from him?” asks Andy, level and frightening as a wind-smoothed ocean. The only time an ocean is calm is before a storm hits; the calmer the water, the wilder the tempest. Nicky swallows. “I’m not spending the rest of my life being afraid of people like _him._ Where’s Merrick, Joe?”

The radio crackles, like Joe just sighed, then he says, heavily, “Up in the penthouse.”

“Andy,” says Booker flatly. “You’re certain?”

She looks at him, but Booker’s always been less frightened of her than either Nicky or Joe; in his cruelest moments, Nicky’s thought that this means he loves her less, too. Andy’s one of those people for whom fear and love is inextricable, each feeding the other into an impossible maelstrom that’s all the worse after Quynh- left them. Nicky doesn’t often admire it in him, the spine that Booker shows- it’s absent often and it’s paltry even more commonly- but he admires it now, watching him look at the woman he’s betrayed with concern even through the shame and pain that sits in the creases of every identity that Booker’s ever inhabited.

(Some people are born sad. Some people are born unable to admire the sun or the stars or the smallest shards of beauty of life. Some people choose not to admire it. It’s a tragedy, whatever the reason: it always is.

But it’s even worse when the person’s immortal.)

“Yes,” says Andy finally. “Yes.”

It’s said so firmly that none of them say anything more, though Nile looks like she wants to. And that, too, is Andy: firm to the bitter end, because she’s spent six thousand years walking this earth and she doesn’t know the fucking meaning of insecurity.

…

They get Merrick; they get his guards; they kill the rest and blow up the laboratory with all their samples. Nile falls to her death and recovers. All five of them flee in the same car that Joe stole from the secondary laboratory. They ditch that one somewhere near a football stadium- Nicky never has understood the desire to build stadiums _in_ the city; civilized people build them at the outskirts, like in Germany- and make their way back to Soho through a mixture of quiet theft, public transportation and just plain walking.

It’s past midnight when they finally walk inside. Andy’s wearing a thick coat to hide the number of bruises and scrapes littering her arms; the rest of them have switched into layers and scrubbed off the worst of the blood from their arms and faces.

“Sleep,” says Andy, when Joe looks like he’s going to start talking. “We’ll talk in the morning.”

“If they’re coming after us-”

“They aren’t,” says Andy. 

She pauses, looking over at Nicky, as if for help; he lifts his hands and backs away. The only way that he’ll calm Joe down is by talking it out, and none of them have the patience for it tonight. Joe needs someone else to guarantee them safety: and the one person he’ll trust for it is Andy.

Her hand comes up and she presses at Joe’s neck, fingers splayed over it so her thumb fits behind his ear, and pulls him forward until they’re forehead to forehead, leaning against each other like two sloping pieces of wood. 

“Sleep, Yusuf,” she says, and even Booker startles at the name. But Andy doesn’t acknowledge them at all, just keeps Joe close, eyes open, voice warmer than Nicky’s heard in- in fucking _centuries._ “We’re fine. I promise you.”

…

Nicky admires the way she says it, too. 

He’s just as terrified of it: of a world without her, of a world without the bright, flickering, furious star of Andromache of Scythia to light it and make it incrementally, incredibly more beautiful.

But all that is in the future: right now there is a hard floor softened by mold and disuse and the questionable merits of a cushion that’s been left to rot for nearly a century. He and Joe strip down to the necessities for decency and also readiness- better not to be kidnapped half-naked, really; they learned _that_ lesson about the same time as the Black Plague- and curl up together, Joe’s arm heavy over Nicky’s chest, his breath warm on Nicky’s neck. 

It’s not enough, really. Time has a way of reducing everything to dust, including love, including memory, including- well. _Everything._

But they’ll make it enough, because that’s what they’ve always done. Because that’s all that they can do: he and Yusuf, peerless warriors, vicious men, fierce lovers, sweet men; there’s nothing else they can do, nothing else they know how to do, and so they will do it well, and they will do it goodly, and they will continue to do it until the stars go dim or their eyes do.

There are not many truths that time allows to remain.

This, this: it’s one of them that Nicky trusts.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. The jian is a double-edged straight sword that looks vaguely like what Andy used in the church fight scene, and it’s been in use since the Spring and Autumn period; I am not any kind of expert on weaponry, though, so this is literally just a wild guess thrown at the wall to see if it’ll stick.  
> a) Edit: Turns out that it's actually probably a sabre, as evidenced by slowing down the video on youtube. #Research  
> 2\. Libretto: nicknames for all of them!!! They all deserve them!!! Also Booker being derived from le Livre is, like, hilarious, and I don’t actually think that Booker would come up with the pun himself so.  
> a) We ALL know that Nicky makes dad jokes though  
> 3\. The top results when typing in Merrick to google really is an architecture company and then a dog-sitting company! I’m not making that bit up lolol  
> 4\. Tipu Sultan lived until 1799 and really desperately hated the British enough to ally with France; guess who was the leader of France at the time? Guess whose army Booker defected from a very short thirteen years later? IT’S ALL CONNECTED Y’ALL  
> 5\. Some geography notes:  
> a) Goussainville isn’t that far from Charles de Gaulle, which is the name of Paris’ international airport  
> b) Amiens is to the north of Paris  
> c) Calais is the north of Amiens, and is the location of the chunnel, which connects Dover with the EU; there’s more specific names, ofc, but I’m… not that invested in accuracy lol  
> 6\. Have we all forgotten that Booker would have been a VERY dramatic nineteen years old when the French Revolution occurred?????????? PRIME LES MIS CROSSOVER MATERIAL HERE PEOPLE  
> a) I literally don’t know anything about LM if that wasn’t obvious already XDDD  
> b) EDIT: Turns out that I _really_ don't know anything about Les Mis, and the story actually takes place in 1832 instead of 1789, so, um, let's just talk about how Booker probably marched to Paris singing Le Marseillaise instead ig lolol  
> 7\. Soho’s this neighborhood in London that used to be known for a thriving night life/sex industry in the… 1980s? As well as being a hub for LGBT+ activity. Andy having a flat there seemed. Er. Appropriate.  
> 8\. Nicky just not knowing cars is a beautiful headcanon what do you mean I don’t have a reason for it?  
> 9\. A number of cultures used to sit on low cushions and eat their meals, but it takes a very specific method of sitting and also good posture, which- once you get used to the dining tables of modern times/western culture- is very hard to adjust to. Poor Nicky’s had to deal with a sprained back every time he ever ate with Quynh.  
> 10\. HAHAHA we researchers really do name all our files like this!!! There’s usually a lot more detail in the title: including name, age, date and other pertinent information. IMM is a shortform for all of the things that I’ve listed here as per my own experience!  
> 11\. I know that cows have four stomachs, but apparently a quick google search tells me that they have four livers too? If I’m wrong and the internet has lied to me, then we’ll assume that Joe is also bad at anatomy and not that I’m just bad at research lol  
> 12\. Booker’s height is 6’1 because that’s Matthias Schoenaerts’ height. Yes. I checked.  
> 13\. 1099 is, ofc, the year of the crusades and also the year that these two idiots met  
> 14\. Germany football stadiums really do tend to be outside the city limits, while the majority of stadiums inside of England- at least- are in the middle of the city. I can’t find any articles to back my point up as of right now, but I think it’s because it was made my a podcast??? Idk, if I ever do find it I’ll add the link XD  
> 15\. Title, of course, comes from "Dirge without music" by Edna St. Vincent Millay


End file.
